I say “fecked” only because, well, this is a family website. In the words of Father Ted, I really mean that other f word. You know, the bad f word.
POLL – Dáil Éireann
Red C / Sunday Business Post
SF: 36% (+2)
FG: 20% (-1)
FF: 15% (-1)
GP: 5% (+1)
SD: 4% (-1)
PBP-S: 3% (nc)
LP: 3% (-1)
AÚ: 2% (nc)
I/O: 11% (nc)May 2022
+/- April 2022— Ireland Votes | #Vote2024 (@Ireland_Votes) May 28, 2022
Most of the attention the latest Sunday Business Post/Red C poll is getting focuses on Sinn Fein’s achievements: The party now polls more support than Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael combined – so much so that if this trend continues, the piece I wrote two weeks ago about how a General Election might not produce a Government will soon be redundant. In that article, I said that for the election to produce any decisive outcome, people would have to get off the fence.
Well, looks like they are.
But that shouldn’t really be the headline. The headline, surely, is the performance of the leading party of Government.
Bear in mind here that at the 2011 General Election, after 14 years in office and in the middle of the worst economic crisis in living memory, led by a man – Brian Cowen – who was no great shakes in terms of appealing to the electorate, Fianna Fáil received 17.4% of the vote, in a result regarded as rock bottom for the party. They’re presently polling fully two points below that, in a poll that has historically been Ireland’s most accurate.
That is despite, from their point of view, having led Ireland through the covid pandemic, and back into a relative economic recovery, and despite the Taoiseach, Mr. Martin, having relatively good personal ratings. In fact, though there’s no figure for it in this poll, Mr. Martin tends to score higher than most other party leaders when voters are asked to rate their politicians personally. There’s a very large chunk of the electorate that like Mr. Martin well enough – they just wouldn’t vote for him. Which should have you in cold sweats, if you are an FF backbencher.
After all, it’s likely to get worse from here. To the extent that FF is being held afloat by the Taoiseach, it’s worth remembering that he will not be the Taoiseach very much longer. Later this year, he will hand over to Mr. Varadkar. If there is some kind of economic pick up in the second half of the Government’s term, then Mr. Varadkar will get much of the credit. Conversely, if things get worse – and remember that there is still a big budget deficit to be closed – Fianna Fáil will come under pressure as the second party in the coalition government.
It all comes back to the core problem with Mr Martin’s leadership, which is that Fianna Fáil lacks any kind of distinctive identity. It used to be the constitutional republican party, but Sinn Fein have stolen those clothes. It used to be, under Mssrs Ahern and McCreevy, the economically centre right party, but Fine Gael have the best (albeit tenuous) claim to that title now. It used to be the party for social conservatives, until Mr. Martin made clear that we were no longer wanted. On no single issue that a voter might care about is Fianna Fáil the obvious choice. And so, the party is reduced to getting votes from the people who vote for it out of little more than habit.
Perhaps the most frightening thing, if you are a Fianna Fáil partisan, is this: The party is on 15%, and it doesn’t seem to care. Where are the backbench rumblings? Look, by contrast, to the UK Tory Party, which fills a similar role in English politics to that which FF traditionally filled here: The natural party of Government. There, falling a few points behind in the polls has Tory MPs openly grumbling about Boris. In Ireland, it’s increasingly reasonable to suspect that FF could fall to 3% support and its TDs simply wouldn’t care. They’re in a kind of trance – unsure of what to do, and not really knowing where to turn.
And so the party is drifting on, towards disaster. After the next election, Sinn Fein will probably try to entice it back into Government as a mudguard. And, at the current rate, it will accept. Because by that stage, the only TDs left will be aul fellas who fancy one last sojourn in a ministerial chair before they retire.
When the PDs reached this stage, they disbanded. It might be the decent thing to consider, by now, for Fianna Fáil, too.